L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

Indian
Cruelty?

[This
text was written by J.
Castell HOPKINS in 1898. For the full citation, see the end of the
document.]

The
Cruelty of the Indian is a frequent and natural theme for the historians
of our alien race. There has been no Indian pen to trace fully and accurately
the history of their varied tribes and strange nationalities, their
complex customs and institutions. As time goes on, however, and they
recede into the dim vistas of a distant past, justice will be more and
more done to the many great traits in their naturally barbaric characters,
and to the noble deeds of warriors and chiefs whose environment of superstition
and ignorance was almost sufficient in itself to destroy every honourabble
or manly instinct. The Rev. Dr. Egerton Ryerson in his volumes upon
The Loyalists of America and their Times very justly points
out similar considerations, and uses as his authority an American work,
Brant and the Border Wars of the Revolution, by W. L. Stone.
As he well says, the spoilers of the Indian have been his literary executors,
and although a reluctant assent has been awarded to some of the nobler
traits of his nature, yet, without yielding a due allowance to the peculiarities
of their situation, the Indian character has been presented with singular
uniformity as being cold, cruel, morose, and revengeful; unrelieved
by any of those varying traits and characteristics, those lights and
shadows which are admitted in respect to other people who have been
no less wild and uncivilized. Nor does it seem to have occurred to these
pale-faced writers that the particular cruelties, the records and descriptions
of which enter so largely into the composition of the earlier volumes
of American and Canadian history, were not barbarities in the estimation
of those who practised them. The scalp-lock was an emblem of chivalry.
Every warrior shaving his head for battle was careful to leave the lock
of defiance upon his crown, as if for the bravado: "Take it if
you can." The stake and the torture were identified with their
rude notions of the power of endurance. They were inflicted upon captives
of their own race as well as upon whites; and with their own braves
these trials were courted, to enable the sufferer to exhibit the courage
and fortitude with which they could be borne - the proud scorn with
which all the pain that a foe might inflict could be endured.

But
it is said that they fell upon slumbering hamlets in the night and massacred
defenceless women and children. This, again, was their own mode of warfare,
as honourable in their estimation as the more courteous methods of committing
wholesale murder laid down in our own military books. "In regard,"
says Mr. Stone, " to the countless acts of cruelty alleged to have
been perpetrated by the savages, it must be borne in mind that the Indians
have had no writer to relate their own side of the story. The annals
of man, probably, do not attest a more kindly reception of intruding
foreigners than was given to the Pilgrims landing at Plmouth by the
faithful Massassoit and the tribes, under his jurisdiction. Nor did
the forest kings take up arms until they but too clearly saw that either
their visitors or themselves must be driven from the soil which was
their own - the fee of which was derived from the Great Spirit. And
the nation is yet to be discovered that will not fight for their homes,
the graves of their fathers, and their family altars. Cruel they were
in the prosecution of their contests, but it would require the aggregate
of a large number of predatory incursions and isolated burnings to balance
the awful scene of conflagration and blood which at once extinguished
the power of Sassacus,
and the brave and indomitable Narragansets
over whom he reigned. No! Until it is forgotten that by some Christians
in infant Massachusetts it was held to be right to kill Indians, as
the agents and familiars of Azazel
; until the early records of even tolerant Connecticut, which disclose
the fact that the Indians were seized by the Puritans, transported to
the British West Indies, and sold as slaves, are lost; until the Amazon
and LaPlata shall have washed away the bloody history of the Spanish
American conquest; and until the fact that Cortez stretched the unhappy
Guatimozin naked upon a bed of burning coals (or General Sullivan's
devastation of the Six Nation Indians) is proved to be fiction ; let
not the American Indians be pronounced the most cruel of men."